AMR’s Top 20 Exhibition Organisers research, explained

At AMR, we’ve often been asked about the growth and consolidation among organisers. In our annual Globex report and forecast we analyse the top exhibition organisers and estimate their market share in the 14 countries that we cover. We also profile the ten largest global organisers (i.e organisers with broad international portfolios) and track their annual development, strategic initiatives, organic growth and latest acquisitions.

Recent discussions with industry stakeholders and accelerating industry consolidation inspired an expansion of our Globex analysis, to include large organisers with primarily domestic portfolios (e.g. MCH, CFTC and CCPIT) and produce a more comprehensive and dynamic ranking, reflecting the latest M&A activity. This initiative became the AMR Top 20 Exhibition Organisers.

The first edition of the ranking was published in EW in December 2016 and our approach to defining and ranking exhibition organising revenues triggered interesting discussions in the industry. We are taking this opportunity to clarify our methodology and the reasoning behind it:

1. We have remained consistent with the Globex definition for organising-only revenue as revenues generated by selling exhibition space, sponsorship and digital services to exhibitors and tickets to visitors. When comparing organisers, we believe it is most useful to look at organising-only revenues; therefore, since the launch of Globex in 2009 we have excluded revenues generated from venue rental and other services such as stand construction. These are typically provided by venues or external service providers and are usually not included in the organising revenue of many of the large international organisers. In cases where organising-only revenues are not readily available in annual reports, AMR applies estimates which we share with the respective organisers.

2. The revenues presented in the AMR Top 20 are pro forma revenues defined as latest published organiser revenues + recent acquisitions.At the time of publication (December 2016), not all organisers had published their expected 2016 revenues, and there had also been major acquisition activity in the year. Therefore, the best comparable data was “2015 revenues + revenue of acquisition targets in the year”. Revenues were converted to USD at the average 2015 exchange rate.

3. We expect that there will be frequent changes in the ranking due to biennial effects and M&A activity, rather than by loss of market share of large events.

A perfectly like-for-like comparison of organiser revenues is difficult, given biennial/triennial effects of many large exhibitions. This is probably why few organisations have attempted to create such a ranking. We are delighted that our approach has led some integrated businesses to look at their revenue components in a different way for the first time.

We will publish our Top 20 ranking every six months. Our next ranking will be published in summer 2017 and will feature the latest available 2016 revenue figures (organic and acquisitions) for all organisers.